


Scars

by CorvidFeathers



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Survivor AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 17:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidFeathers/pseuds/CorvidFeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The six scars on Enjolras's skin are long healed by the time the anniversary of the June Rebellion rolls around.  Other scars are not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lightning-st0rm on tumblr.

Six scars.

Courfeyrac counted them, his fingers hovering over the fabric of Enjolras’s shirt. It was open, showing the cruelly puckered skin of one of the scars, but Courfeyrac could remember vividly where the other five were.

A year had turned bleeding wounds to white lines and knots. 

Combeferre could remember the barricade perfectly, Courfeyrac knew. It was the curse of analytical mind. He had stumbled across sketches, hidden in the pages of Combeferre’s medical books, detailing the behemoth that had split their lives in two, every piece of furniture and armament in place. There were even the little glimmers of the glass sheet Gavroche had instructed be put on the front of the barricade, broken to a thousand pieces to fend off the assault of the National Guard.

A perfect memory of those nights could be a curse. But privately Courfeyrac thought it might be a relief to be able to recall things so perfectly, and set them out so logically. To come to terms with it at last.

For Courfeyrac those bloodsoaked days in June were flashes of feeling and flashes of gunpowder. He could remember the cold terror that had run through him as the first barrage was fired, the realization that once again it had come to this and he could die that very day. He could still feel the weight of the carbine in his hands as he loaded it and lifted it again and again. The wild joy when Marius had saved him from a certain death, the brief, desperate happiness of being granted a reprieve. The soft strength of Jehan’s voice as he leaned against the barricade, punctuating his poetry with the movement of his hands. Smearing Marius’s blood on his hands as he tried to bandage his head and feeling a silly little pang of reluctance when he wiped the blood off on his pants. The air thick with the stench of it all, later. His feet hitting the ground and his shoulders aching under the weight of Enjolras on his own wounds.

No, he would have liked to be able to lay it out with a diagram, a drawing, something to analyze and confirm.

But Combeferre’s drawing were just sketches of furniture and paving stones- they lacked the frantic figures that had breathed a brief, bloody life into the barricade with their last hours.

Maybe Combeferre’s drawing weren’t closure.

A year before he and Combeferre had staggered, bleeding, from the barricade, escaped against all odds with Enjolras, barely breathing, supported between them.

A year had turned horrible wounds to scars, and a year had been time to find their resolve again, turn pain and grief into a dull ache that most days they could push to the forefront of his mind.

But every now and then he would catch himself nearly calling out Feuilly’s name to Bernard or Caron, and sometimes when Fabron bounced up to show Combeferre some bit of satirical poetry Courfeyrac knew he was thinking of a poet of a less sarcastic bent. 

Sometimes when Rene had a drunken, over-exuberant blunder and Enjolras had words with him, Enjolras would clasp his hands together so tightly that his knuckles would turn white, and Courfeyrac knew he was thinking of a less passionate drunk from a lifetime ago.

It was a lifetime, because by all rights they should had died along with the others.

That knowledge didn’t hinder them in their cause, and it was remarkable how quickly their life had fallen back to routine, even with Enjolras still recovering and a group to be built from scratch. Passionate young students had arrived in Paris at the end of the summer, with wide eyes and open ears and quick minds and tongues, and with them the three had created something new.

But the six mortal wounds and the six newly-dug graves that had them clinging together just for life a year before drove them back together again, to huddle together in the silence and seek what comfort they could on the eve of all they had lost.

Six scars and six graves where grass had begun to grow.


End file.
